24 November, 2016

Filly Funtasia's "New Status"

Looks like Filly Funtasia might not be cancelled after all! Dracco has recently begun responding to queries about Filly Funtasia through their MyFilly account with a message:

Nice

As you may notice, the answer doesn't really match the question. That's because this seems to be the answer they respond with to every Filly Funtasia-related question right now, according to the conversations people have shown us. It appears that this statement is all that they are willing to (or able to) give us right now, so please don't go flooding their account with questions.

So Dracco is still working on Filly Funtasia according to their Facebook page - and they will announce a "new information and status". Now, this could mean a lot of things, but "new status" makes it sound like some large change has occurred. Meanwhile, a few things have also happened on BRB's end:
Their long, slowprocess of removing Filly Funtasia material continues. First of all, BRB has replaced the banner image that they used on their Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages.

The old banner

The new banner

The new one has decidedly less horse in it. They also used the old banner on their tumblr page which had not been updated in a long time and which has been delinked from their website for at least a year now. When I pointed out to them that they had forgotten to update the banner on their tumblr, they responded by deleting their tumblr entirely. Come on, that was a bit of an overreaction.

Click the image for high res

They have also made a change to the text on their About Page - removing Filly Funtasia from a list of shows they're working on. Okay, that has to unambiguously mean that they're most likely not working on it anymore. While one can think up alternate explanations for all the other removals, I really can't come up with any good reason to conduct this particular removal if they are indeed still working on Filly Funtasia.

Lastly, I want to finish this article by discussing something pointed out to me on Twitter (and on Fillychan) by Aurelicornus - that BRB was supposed to manage the rights to Filly in Spain (and also, in Portugal):

And as we pointed out in FYI #1, the breaking of the Simba-Dracco licensing agreement meant that Filly disappeared from several markets - one of them being Sweden, as I experienced personally. Were the two Iberian countries also affected similarly? If they were, those rights in Spain and Portugal would then likely become less valuable which might possibly be a contributing factor for why BRB might want to pull out of the deal if Filly has failed to re-enter that market.

Is the "new status" of Filly Funtasia that the production company is being replaced? Perhaps, replaced by a company situated in a country where Filly is still doing well? Maybe even one that wants a similar deal to the one BRB was offered? We can't really know that since this is all wild speculation at this point, but a hint to finding out what country production of Filly Funtasia might potentially be restarted in would be to find out how well the Filly toys are selling in different countries. (And finding out how sales in Iberia are doing would provide evidence for or against the hypothesis we've talked about above.) We've been unable to find any statistics relating to the sale of Filly outside Germany, and that's why we're asking for your help.

What is the Filly situation like in your part of the world? Have you seen Filly toys in stores? A lot, or just a few? Are there Filly toys for sale in your country's major online toy retailers? Please let us know in the comments!